On TAP: Kuttner + Meyerson

It took forever (nearly eight years), but a key provision of Dodd-Frank is finally being implemented. Public corporations have finally begun to report the ratio between their CEO’s pay and the pay of their median worker.

Dodd-Frank mandated that these companies calculate and release these numbers in their annual filings to the SEC. Honeywell (a company whose CEO, before he became W’s vice president, was Dick Cheney) has gone first, reporting that its current CEO makes a modest 333 times what it’s median employee pulls down.

Fifty years ago, when unions were strong and America was notably less plutocratic, the average CEO made roughly 20 times what his (then as now, CEOs tended to be male) average worker made. Indeed, the great management consultant Peter Drucker prescribed that multiple of 20 as the proper ceiling, not to be exceeded, of the CEO-median ratio.

But that was then. Ronald Reagan’s epochal reduction of the taxes on the highest incomes, his SEC’s rule-change allowing CEOs to manipulate share buybacks, Milton Friedman’s very popular (among CEOs) doctrine that the sole purpose of corporations was to reward shareholders, and his emphasis of the power of CEO unions (that is, corporate boards of directors, on which CEOs of other corporations sit and happily approve astronomical pay deals for that company’s CEO, creating a standard that the CEOs who sit on their own corporations’ boards will obligingly meet)—all these have combined to raise CEO pay to dizzying, not to say nauseating, heights. Simultaneously, the weakening of unions was one among many factors that kept median worker pay from rising very much.

Honeywell’s 333-to-1 ratio is within the range of the ratios for all corporations that organizations that have sought to measure this have come up with in recent years: Most of the averages have ranged from 200-to-1 to 350-to-1. As the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) has noted, Honeywell actually didn’t include the pay of its employees in nations with developing economies in calculating its ratio, presumably because it didn’t want a ratio that could have topped, say, 500-to-1. IPS has cautioned that other corporations are likely to do the same.

One question that CEOs seldom address, partly because it’s too seldom asked, is why they deserve so much more than the CEOs who ran their companies 50 years ago, when the U.S. economy enjoyed a much more broadly shared prosperity than it does today. As the ratio of their pay to their employees’ has grown from 20-to-1 to 300-to-1, why are they worth, on a ratio basis, 15 times more than their mid-century predecessors? Is the American economy doing 15 times better than it was in 1968? Hardly.

Armageddon by degree. I’m no expert in cyber-security, but I’ve given a lot of thought to the health of American democracy. It was in none too robust a condition even before Vladimir Putin let loose his army of covert trolls and bots to wreak havoc. Thus, anybody who cares about our democracy needs to care about cyber-security.

Lurking beneath the Mueller revelations about Russian disruption of the core of American democracy is a problem from hell. How do we prevent the Kremlin from either hijacking our process of deliberation with malicious, fake social media activism, or meddling with our patchwork system of elections generally?

Since all of this leads back to Putin, the most efficient way to shut it down would be to significantly raise the cost to Putin of continuing these badly disguised Kremlin operations. But how? Interviews with senior cyber-security experts and a reading of various reports and congressional testimonies suggest that the smartest people in the national security establishment feel stymied.

Both the Americans and the Russians have the capacity to take out each other’s vital systems that depend on internet-based controls—everything from national defense to civil aviation to the water supply to the banking system. We’ve seen this technique used very sparingly, as in the case of the Stuxnet worm that disabled Iranian centrifuges.

But for the most part, where the U.S. and Russia are concerned, there has been a tacit understanding of mutual restraint, not unlike the nuclear restraint given the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. Nobody would win a demolition derby to use cyber-warfare to destroy each other’s vital infrastructure.

But there the similarity ends. Putin breached that understanding when he decided to disrupt American democracy. And the smartest people in the room don’t know what to do about it.

The efforts late in the Obama administration to punish Russia by freezing some bank assets and banning some travel are pitiful. But should America take out, say, the Moscow subway? Or publish fake Russian news to embarrass Putin? Or just what?

Experts have been thrown back on the idea that it’s up to the social media platforms to police themselves, perhaps with some collaboration with government cyber agencies. This seems improbable. Can we really expect Facebook and Twitter to identify multi-camouflaged trolls? Having social media platforms try to play whack-a-mole is no substitute for a national strategy.

Our friend Art Goldhammer points to the case of a report in the German tabloid Bild, that the efforts of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to get members to vote against the proposed Merkel-SPD coalition was abetted by Russian trolls. But then another, satirical publication claimed that it had hoaxed Bild. (And maybe that was itself a hoax by The Onion.)

We are in Hall of Mirrors land. The shortest distance between the mess we are in and a remedy to rescue democracy is posing unacceptable costs to Putin. A Nobel Prize awaits the people who figure out what that strategy is.

Maybe the kids can do what the grown-ups can’t: beat the GOP and the NRA.

The anti-gun-insanity Children’s Crusade (well, really, a teenagers’ crusade) that is emerging in reaction to the Parkland massacre has clear potential to a sweep away the roadblocks that congressional Republicans have long placed before any efforts to institute universal background checks on gun buyers and to ban the sale of semi-automatic weapons. Whatever the kids may be, they’re not the “other.” They’re not liberal elites or PC academics; most aren’t immigrants; more than half are white. They’re very hard to demonize, and their demand—stop killing us—doesn’t ring all that radical to the ear.

Remove demonization from the conservatives’ quiver, and you’ve all but disarmed the right. No longer able to shift the discussion to the secret agenda of the left, the NRAniks might actually have to debate the merits of, say, universal background checks—which 90 percent of the public supports. ‘Tis a conversation devoutly to be wished.

The kids have the potential to push the debate a little beyond that, too. Opposing all members of Congress who’ve taken the NRA’s pieces of silver (more than 30) extends the discussion, willy-nilly, to the absurdity of our campaign-finance system. And banning the sale of killing machines like the AR-15 could be accompanied by corresponding legislation that limits the sale of ammunition.

Take to the streets, kids, to the digital and actual soapboxes, and to precinct walking for candidates who’re opposing those incumbents who place a higher value on NRA endorsements than they do on your lives. You have real enemies in high places. You can really help oust them.

Our thoughts and prayers. One possibly redeeming consequence of the latest massacre of school children is that the scapegoating of mental illness and the parade of politicians who take NRA money expressing “thoughts and prayers” for dead children and grieving parents are wearing thin.

It’s time to take over the national narrative. These are not “shooters.” They are domestic terrorists. And this is not about balancing gun rights with other rights. It’s about keeping our children safe.

As I suggested the other day in this space discussing cuts in urgently needed social outlay, keeping guns from killing our children is ultimately about the right to life.

Progressives should keep applying that phrase to where it really fits, to the point where it loses all utility to anti-abortion zealots.

What’s the point of protecting the “unborn” when we fail to protect the living?

The above sloganeering is my response to an interview with me that was aired as part of a story on NPR’s Morning Edition yesterday. Last week, the redoubtable Ina Jaffe, intrepid NPR veteran, called me to talk about Dianne Feinstein. The reason she called was that I had written an L.A. Times op-ed some months back noting that Feinstein, at 84, is the oldest member of the Senate, and at the time was considering running for another six-year term, which, if she won, would mean she’d be 91.7 years old when that term expired. I noted that would get her in just under the actuarial wire, since the average life expectancy for 84-year-old women is 92. I ended the column by suggesting Feinstein not run—counsel she didn’t take all that seriously, since she declared her candidacy a few days later.

Ina’s piece was focused on the age issue. What I also said in the column and the interview, however, was age wasn’t the main reason why DiFi shouldn’t go one more round. The chief reason was that the California she’s accustomed to representing no longer exists. It’s a far more liberal state than the one Feinstein has long been navigating by positioning herself on the center-right of the Democratic Party.

Unlike most of California’s Democratic congressional delegation, for instance, Feinstein voted to authorize the Iraq War. She was among the small minority of Democratic senators to vote for George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich—and those Democrats who also voted for them came from red or purple states, which California, then as now, was not.

Fortunately, Feinstein isn’t going unchallenged. While she has no Republican opponents, the president of the California Senate, Los Angeles Democrat Kevin de Leon, is running against her from the left. One of the three organizers of the massive anti-Proposition 187 demonstration in 1994, which marked the birth of the modern immigrant movement, de Leon is arguably the most accomplished and most progressive state legislative leader in the country. He’s the author of California’s sanctuary state law, of most of its far-reaching climate-change legislation, and last year steered a single-payer bill to passage in the Senate.

The conventional wisdom is that Feinstein is a shoo-in, but just this week, some of the state’s most powerful liberal institutions come election time—SEIU, which has 700,000 members in California, and the California Nurses Association—endorsed de Leon. SEIU and CNA are longtime rivals that seldom agree on anything. That the two most potent political players in California Democratic elections have both come out for de Leon—risking the ire of ostensible shoo-in Feinstein—speaks volumes about where they think the state is headed, and should be headed. Maybe DiFi isn’t a shoo-in after all.

And just to clear up this age business: I think Feinstein’s fellow San Franciscan, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, who also has drawn criticism for getting long in the tooth, should stay right where she is. Like de Leon, Pelosi is a supremely able legislative leader, without whom Obamacare would never have been enacted, and whose politics are far more in sync with left-moving California than Feinstein’s.

Besides, Pelosi would have to win seven more terms to be as old as Feinstein would be at the end of her next Senate term. Hence:

Ban Entitlements. My friend Drew Westen, author of the classic book on political language, The Political Brain, observes that Republicans run rings around Democrats when it comes to the Orwellian use of political language, and that Democrats often step on their own strengths.

For instance, as Westen observes, Democrats should never, ever use the budgetary term entitlements to describe our two most cherished Democratic programs, Social Security and Medicare. Democrats use the term either because they want to sound like savvy wonks, or out of sheer laziness.

To normal ears, the word has a negative connotation. People who are narcissistic are often described as “entitled.” They are not fun to be around.

Why in the world should we describe an earned, tax-supported, beloved program of social insurance as an “entitlement”? It would be hard to think of a worse term. It sets up the argument that these benefits should be taken away from all those undeserving, entitled people.

The word entitlement is bad enough in the bowels of OMB, but should never be used on the campaign trail. Just plain Medicare and Social Security are recognizable names with very positive voter approval.

I recently heard an otherwise savvy political operative describe conservative voters in a swing district as “pro-life.” No, they’re not. They are anti-reproductive rights. (Is that so hard to remember?)

When the right trains Democrats to unthinkingly use the right’s language, we are in big trouble. Indeed, if you define pro-life as actually helping the living, it’s Democrats who are pro-life.

Maybe we should appropriate the term "pro-life" for any beneficial social outlay and thereby muddle its political value to the right. (What do you mean you want to cut outlays for foster-care, home care, elder care, disability, etc. Aren’t you pro-life?)

Pay close attention to language, Democrats. Voters might be listening.

In its zeal to meet deportation quotas, ICE has shown complete indifference to such trivialities as whether their detainees have committed serious crimes or are esteemed members of their communities. As a piece in Monday’s Washington Post documented, ICE arrested 37,734 “non-criminals” in 2017, breaking up families and communities in the process.

The closest parallel in American history to ICE’s current expulsion mania is the grim saga of the Fugitive Slave Act. The act, passed by a Southern-dominated Congress in 1850, effectively gave police power to slaveholders and their agents to go into the non-slave states of the North to capture and re-enslave African Americans who’d achieved the status of free men and women by crossing the Mason-Dixon line. Then as now, federal law conscripted the local authorities in Northern states—where the pursued were welcome—to cooperate with the hunters, and on occasion federal forces were sent to help in the apprehensions.

And then as now, the reason that federal forces were sent was that many in those Northern states sought to thwart the slaveholders and the soldiers. African Americans concealed their hunted brothers and sisters, on a couple of occasions overpowering the slaveholders to free them again. State and local governments passed laws forbidding such cooperation, much as California has passed such laws today. Masses of people turned out to protest the seizures, just as rapid response teams do today.

Underpinning both these abysmal episodes in our history is a sectionalized racism. The Fugitive Slave Act effectively imposed Southern slave codes on Northern states that had no desire to enforce them. The ICE raids impose the racism and xenophobia of the worst parts of Trump’s base, disproportionately clustered in heavily white regions home to few if any immigrants, on states like California and New York, where immigrants are not just welcome but an axiom of local life.

In response, a number of local and state governments have offered legal assistance to ICE arrestees and forbidden police cooperation with them, while activists have turned out in the streets and the courts to support the detainees. All necessary actions, but there’s still more that could be done. At least so long as ICE continues to arrest and deport immigrants with no regard for what they’ve done and who they are, ICE agents should be treated as Northerners treated the slaveholder-kidnappers. Sit-down demonstrations obstructing ICE offices seem a good way to start.

Can you dig this? Trump’s $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan is another bait and switch. For starters, it’s dead on arrival, since Congress just concluded a two-year budget deal after massive horse-trading. Legislators are not about to reopen negotiations.

It’s bizarre that Trump releases his budget after rather than before this deal. It’s one more sign of his irrelevance.

As for the proposed infrastructure plan, it proposes $200 billion of actual federal spending over a decade. The rest is supposed to be private money, with the idea that a federal match will somehow coax out private investment—at a ratio of 6.5 to one.

But here’s the problem. True investments in public works do not produce private returns. That’s why they have to be public.

For private investors to make money on long term investments in things like better electrical grids, green transition, water and sewer, protections against storm surges and sea level rise, replacement of aging bridges, tunnels and roads, better rail, and so on, investors want large profits.

And there are only three ways to get those profits. You can pass the costs along to taxpayers. Or you can pass the costs along to ratepayers. Or Republicans at the federal and state level can rig the tax code so that massive tax breaks can be offered to private investors.

All of this is more costly and less efficient, as well as less fair, than straight ahead public investment funded by direct government bonds or taxes.

This is dumb, dumb policy, aimed at further enriching the rich and denuding the public realm. And if voters don’t see through it, Trump is smarter than the public.

NPR reported that Democrats will back this scheme because they are so eager to get infrastructure spending. I sure hope that’s wrong. Democrats need to be leading the charge for the real deal, not Trump fakery.

When Obama was president, Republicans made a huge deal about deficits bankrupting the country, refusing to adequately fund the recovery program and demanding deep cuts in federal spending. Now that Trump is in, deficits suddenly don’t matter.

The tax cut will add a trillion dollars to the national debt. The budget deal that was recently struck to keep the government open restores both military and some domestic social spending that was cut by Republican congresses during the Obama presidency—adding more deficit.

The deficit, and with it the national debt, is projected to start rising again, after coming down during Obama’s presidency. Deficit hawks are going nuts.

But Democrats should resist the temptation to pile on. Within very broad limits, there is nothing wrong with deficits and public borrowing, so long as money is put to good use. We came out of World War II with a much larger debt ratio—and that ushered in a 30-year boom. Winning that war was a good use of public debt.

A trillion-dollar tax cut for the rich, however, is not good use. Spending that money on infrastructure would be fine, and the time to have done that was while federal borrowing costs (interest rates) were low. Overspending on the military today is not a good use either.

Both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama made the economic and tactical error of making deficit reduction per se a major public issue. They thereby helped Republicans deny government the resources to rebuild America’s public household, and entrenched the conservative idea in the public mind of budget balance equaling fiscal virtue.

Keynes wept!

Deficits are often just what’s needed, and not all deficits are created equal. Fiscally, let’s whack Trump where he deserves to be whacked—for a needless and regressive tax cut. When the Democrats get back in, they will need to double down on public investment.

I have two quite opposite reactions to President Trump’s desire to have his own version of a Red Square Roll-Out-The-Nukes-and-Salute! parade.

The first is to note the absurdity of all this. At a time when even hard power is best measured by a nation’s development of things like quantum computing, our new tanks aren’t really a good measure of our might. More fundamentally, this isn’t really an American tradition, and in its sure-to-be-Trumpified version, it will likely come off as more than a little Graustark, or perhaps Duck Soup, with a chorus singing the Trumpian version of “Hail, Hail, Fredonia.” All in all, given the character of the president, a spectacle both ominous (this moron may actually want to use these weapons) and ridiculous.

My second reaction, though, may well be to hold the ridicule. That is, it’s fine to ridicule Trump, who fairly personifies the ridiculous, but ridiculing the military is something else again. As Andy Levison, our pre-eminent scholar of the white working class, has noted, one defining element of that group’s beliefs is its support for the military. That’s in large part because the military offers working-class Americans a path to doing serious, valued work, in which achievement is rewarded, at a time when few other such options are open to them. To be sure, some of that work goes on in wars that shouldn’t be fought in the first place, but that’s hardly the fault of the enlistees. There’s no reason, in other words, to ridicule them.

So: To the extent that this parade is Trumpified—to the extent that it comes off as a Hail to the Chief sashay, as goose-stepping comes to Mar-a-Lago—then yes, ridicule is required. But ridicule the military (which didn’t ask for this march) and the men and women who fill its ranks? No way.